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Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.

Nawal El Saadawi

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Nawal El Saadawi
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 27
Died: 2021
Died: March 21
Feminist
Gynaecologist
Novelist
Physician
Physician Writer
Politician
Psychiatrist
Writer
Nawal el-Saadaoui
Nawal al Sadaawi
Nawal Saadawi
Nawal as-Saadawi
Nawäl as-Saʿdāwi
Live
Hard
Really
Life
People
Harder

More quotes by Nawal El Saadawi

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When I am in Egypt, I am phoned because I am listed in the medical directory under Mental Health and Psychiatry. And of course, I see very few people, because I give much more time to writing. So I cannot say that I really stopped medicine, but I practice medicine - or psychiatry - in a very different way. In an artistic way!
Nawal El Saadawi
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You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.
Nawal El Saadawi
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I practiced medicine up 'til now. I practice psychiatry. I shifted from different specialties. I started as a village doctor - community doctor, public health preventive medicine.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Women were everywhere in the revolution. Women participated in it, and many women were killed. Then we had the right to speak up and gain some more rights, but what happened was there was a backlash. Why? Because we have the Salafists, Muslim Brothers, religious groups.
Nawal El Saadawi
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To me, 'beauty' means to be natural, creative, honest - to say the truth.
Nawal El Saadawi
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I've lived in Egypt among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Language, journalism, food, sex. All is politics. Even innocent love stories are politics. ... There is no such thing as neutrality.
Nawal El Saadawi
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The tracing of a child's lineage and its name with reference to the father, though it has lasted for many thousands of years, has not become any the more natural or reasonable as a result.
Nawal El Saadawi
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We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us -- its size, motion and meaning.
Nawal El Saadawi
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My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite is deadly.
Nawal El Saadawi
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The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular. There was not a single Islamic slogan. It was secular men and women, and in fact, they were unified. Now they want to divide the revolution, and religion is a very strong weapon.
Nawal El Saadawi
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All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.
Nawal El Saadawi
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I've lived here [in Egypt] among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia. The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.
Nawal El Saadawi
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There is not a revolution that succe Saudi Arabia paid $7 billion for the Salafists to come, and the United States and Israel are pouring a lot of money into Egypt. Why? To divide the country by religion.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Truth is relative, and there is always something missing in truth that prevents it from being perfect.
Nawal El Saadawi
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We see our homeland more clearly when we are away from it than when we are in it.
Nawal El Saadawi
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People like [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor], whether young people, young women, even critics - male critics - they were not shocked by it. Of course, some parts were cut.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.
Nawal El Saadawi